


From A Land Unknown

by lunafreya8



Series: Were It Not So Holy verse [2]
Category: Fire Emblem: If | Fire Emblem: Fates
Genre: Gen, Hoshido | Birthright Route
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-09
Updated: 2020-08-09
Packaged: 2021-03-06 02:47:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,689
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25806091
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lunafreya8/pseuds/lunafreya8
Summary: The immediate aftermath. Odin is in there, somewhere, and Niles and Leo won’t leave without him.(Or: when you mix a literal river of magical energy and a prince used to performing feats of incredible magic, the results will be far more reaching than you’d expect.)
Series: Were It Not So Holy verse [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1425571
Comments: 7
Kudos: 34





	From A Land Unknown

The world rose and fell in a cursed wave.

Niles could feel the earth shake beneath him, with an aura thick with dark magic so deep that even he could sense it, and looked behind him to see an eerie purple light glow from the center of the forest. From where there had been relative quiet before, now there were screams piercing through the forest, marking some disaster from where he ran from.

Where he had left Odin, clutching at his arm and gasping for air.

“Leo! We need to head back!” But there was no answer—of all of the times for him to lose Leo, now was the time that Leo decided to run off? He was sworn to protect Leo, and he’d give his life for him, but he’d left Odin in a compromised state, in what sounded like a bad fight.

If he was lucky, he might have thought that the commotion was an inexperienced unit going against some faceless. If he was foolish, he would have thought that the forest had finally gotten to one of their enemies. If he was naive, he might have thought it a skirmish. But he was none of those things, and knew. Knew that those screams were of exquisite pain, not of shock or fear; knew that that light had been something that he’d never seen in any of his travels in the forest; knew those voices were those that he had faced on the battlefield.

The Hoshidans had run into someone, or something, and were losing. Badly.

Niles had absolutely no magical talent. Some days, he couldn’t make a potion work for him. He needed someone with magic with him to face off whatever was doing that, so that he could save Odin (if that was even possible at this juncture). He hoped that Odin had managed to sneak away somehow, but couldn’t shake the thought that Odin had been caught by the Hoshidans, or worse, killed by whatever was out there.

And what if Leo, without thinking, ran into that disaster? Niles clearly couldn’t rely on his rationality anymore.

Part of him wanted to head back to Odin immediately, and leave Leo in the forest—this area was usually the safer part, and Leo had a good grasp on where would be safe for him to hide and wait for Odin or Niles to reach him, but more of him knew that he had to find Leo first. After all, Leo had probably at least seen the light, if not felt the magic himself on a level that Niles couldn’t comprehend. He was probably just as panicked as Niles himself was—if not more so, not only for him and Odin, but also for Corrin. (Why Leo bothered, he didn’t know.)

Niles propped himself on one of the more stable-looking trees in the area; everything seemed to loosen from its roots in the area around him, some of the smaller trees being held only by the vines that were around them. Deciding which was was even safe for him to travel to find Odin and Leo was going to be difficult. The way he came in wasn’t necessarily safe any longer (not even regarding the panicked enemies, which would be their own problem). But he had to make a decision—

A flash of yellow on dark flashed in his vision, and he turned to see in the distance Leo, frantically looking around. “Niles, Odin! We need to leave!”

Niles closed the distance. “We do, but Odin’s still back there. Which means we either need to go back and get him, or—“

“Or what, leave him behind?”

“Wait for him to get to us, instead of trying to meet somewhere where none of us are safe. It’s this bad here— how much worse is it his direction? He was following us when I last saw him, but that was too long ago at this point.”

“We’ll head closer. Odin can usually find us if we’re around him, but if he was in that explosion, he’s too far to know where we are.”

And so it was decided. They headed deeper into the forest, back along the improvised path on which they had emerged. Niles guided the two of them back along the rough path that they had created with their confused dash, now significantly more disheveled than when they had started, while Leo sensed for the wild magic that flowed out from the center, curling into the forest and destroying the land. The more subtle waves of magic, he had no way of knowing he was walking through beyond seeing the creases in Leo’s brow and the scowl on Leo’s face deepening, allowing him to anticipate when Leo would pull him away, steering him into an alternate path that wasn’t as risky. But even though Niles couldn’t inherently sense magic, he could see the effects of the more obvious streams of magic: trees with spider-web veins of magic thrumming inside them, cracks in the ground with a strange liquid emanating from them, small clusters of yellow flowers that he had never seen before with a sickly sweet scent that he could smell from a yard away. 

As they got closer, Leo was steering him more and more, and Niles was avoiding the obvious signs more and more, to where Niles was having to create a whole new path out of the land to try and reach Odin. He thought that they might be going too south to reach Odin, but they didn’t need to get to him. Just close enough for him to reach them.

Rustling, in the bushes beside them. Leo perked and started to turn to his left, most likely thinking that it was Odin, finally finding them. But the sounds were too loud to be Odin; Odin’s steps were much lighter than what he was hearing, even when Odin was over-excited and jumping around. Beyond Odin having a sense of sound and stealth that matched his own, Odin never wore heavy armor, no matter the situation. (Niles kept out of the plating purely for his shoulder mobility, but those three of Odin’s avoided any heavy plating with a vengeance. Selena would usually agree to leather, and Odin could be pushed into it when necessary, but Laslow would not wear anything more heavy than a regular shirt, despite all of their protests.) So unless Odin had acquired a pair of swords when they weren’t looking (and swinging them into each other at a ridiculous rhythm), the clang of metal didn’t fit with who they hoped it was.

Niles covered Leo’s mouth and pulled him over into a small hiding spot; it wasn’t perfect, and was cramped with both of them in there, but they had two ways out, if they were spotted. Also, with the distance between them being eliminated, they could at least communicate without having to use the hand signals that Leo still had trouble with. “That’s not Odin.”

Leo was still squirming in his grip. “But that’s his magic, it’s definitely him!”

“Or he got a lucky hit on them.”

“That much of a hit? I know that Odin’s strong, but it feels like it’s him, not someone—“ Niles covered his mouth again as they approached.

As the figures approached, Niles was definitely glad that they had hidden. From what he could see, three figures were walking through, and all three of them were impressively bloody. There seemed to have been an attempt to heal them, but considering that one of them looked to be in a sling, it seemed that something had gone wrong with their healers. They were speaking in Hoshidan as they came closer, and while Niles’s Hoshidan wasn’t up to speaking in a formal setting, he could understand enough of their hushed conversation to get an idea of whether they were in trouble. And considering he kept hearing Odin’s name, he definitely paid attention to the conversation.

What he could gather from their hushed tones is that they had run into Odin (not good, but what he was expecting), that Odin had gotten angry at them (also not good but expected— Odin usually held his temper well, but if he was facing enemies when he was in pain, that would go straight out the window), and that he’d caused a magic— burst? explosion? — that had injured them. What he wasn’t getting from their conversation, unfortunately, was the most important factors—what had caused that giant wave of magic? (It could have been Odin, Odin had a thousand different secrets up his sleeve, but he just. Couldn’t believe that Odin had done that.) What had happened between Odin defending himself and the Hoshidans walking down their path? Was he captured? Was he running, hoping to find them? Was he injured, unable to move, or dead? (He’d never seen Hoshidans with injuries that their healers couldn’t fix. To drive Odin to fight like that—it couldn’t be a good sign.)

But even though he couldn’t understand the Hoshidans, Leo could. He was fluent in Hoshidan, as he was in most languages that weren’t one of Odin’s. Leo, who was growing more pale and more confused in Niles’s arms as the Hoshidans passed, getting more agitated. Niles struggled to hold him down until they had passed, until he believed that Leo’s less restrained whispers could not alert the Hoshidans anymore.

When they had finally passed, Leo was much quieter than expected. “They’re saying he opened a dragon vein.”

That was surprising, to say the least. Certainly astonishing, for one of the royal family like Leo. Niles doubted that the report was actually true. Did Odin fake opening a dragon vein, to intimidate one of the Hoshidan royals to do it accidentally and instinctively? Possibly. Odin was a great actor when he actually tried (all of the practice looking like a dramatic fool certainly helped), and Odin would have the understanding of magic to know where to put their royals and what to say to trick them into doing it themselves. That would have also freaked out the Hoshidans, and caused the giant explosion that they saw.

But the picture didn’t look quite right for that. Niles knew what the effects of a Hoshidan opening a dragon vein looked like, and they weren’t that. Even if you accounted for all of the magical interference in the forest, it still wouldn’t produce that much of a difference. Especially considering that the effects were still ongoing.

Was it possible that Odin had managed to pry it open somehow? If he had enough magic to push it open, leaving him on the verge of death? As much as people liked to joke that Odin could have been an illegitimate child of Garon (and as easy as that would explain Odin’s inexplicable hatred of Garon from day one), Niles knew that it was still exceedingly unlikely.

They needed to find Odin. Fast.

“If he did open it, we need to see if we can get him to safety. If he didn’t, then he’s still likely in danger. Let’s head out.”

“He can’t open, he shouldn’t be opening it, he’s not capable of opening it—but they’re saying he did, they’re saying they know he did—“ and now Leo was panicking. Not good.

“Leo. What happens if Odin did open it?”

The fact that Leo somehow managed to pale further wasn’t good, either. “You don’t know?”

“Never had enough talent to be warned.”

“If he opened it and was deemed not worthy of it, he would at best have all of his magic ripped straight out of his flesh. All of it. Even the basics that keep him alive. He’d have dropped dead on the spot. At worst, it would have ripped his flesh like his magic. He’d be in half, maybe, missing limbs, torn to pieces. There’s a reason no one tries, and why people were willing to stay illegitimate rather than risk that.”

“I don’t think either of those things happened—“ Leo went to cut him off, but Niles continued “—from what I could get of their conversation, which I know isn’t much, they were worried about him coming back to get them, at some point. Which, if he had just died like you described, they would have seen. Did they capture him?”

Leo shook his head. “Probably not, but I can’t say for certain. It sounds like they in particular scrambled as fast as they could, and so ran into their healer lately. Everyone still isn’t accounted for on their side, so one of them might have gotten a hold of Odin.”

“Then I’d recommend we keep looking for him. He might be unconscious, but he’s probably still in there.”

They kept moving, but as they moved, everything kept getting worse. There was far more sun in the forest than there had ever been, despite the aura of the foreign dark magic still hanging over them. Partially because this magic did something to the magic of the forest that caused it to flee, even dissipate, but mostly because there weren’t trees where there should have been anymore. Some of them had been felled, cluttering the path they tried to tread; but it seemed that more of them had just—disappeared would be the word Niles would pick, although Leo probably would have said that they had been outright dissolved—leaving these strange, deep burrow holes where the roots had once lain, some of them thicker than Niles’s arm and deeper than he suspected the castle’s foundation ran.

This wasn’t even the worst of it. They had at least a mile more to go when they ran into it. A jagged eruption from the ground, the rocks tenting up like something had exploded underneath them. It seemed to branch farther in the distance, going as far as Niles could see in either direction. On the top of the rocks, like a crown, a thick row of those yellow flowers, larger than they were anywhere else, with a less sickly sweet, deeper scent. Next to him, Leo was shaking with his whole self, his face caught in a grimace, his eyes wider than he had ever seen them, his magic visibly coiling around his hands and in his feet.

His voice even shook as he spoke. “It’s a dragon vein.”

Now that Niles looked a bit more closely, he could see that same deep purple light emerge from the rocks. “I believe you, considering that I normally can’t sense them, never mind see them like this.”

Leo shuddered further, somehow. “You can’t—it’s far worse than it looks on the surface. Normally, they’re gentle streams under your feet, and pulling from them is like grabbing a cup of water.” At Niles’s confusion, he explained. “Not at first, obviously—you have to prove yourself with your strength, but as you pull more, and you learn to pull less, it gets easier. But now—now—it’s rapids on the river heading towards a waterfall going into the bottomless canyon. I’m this far away from it, and I’m still terrified that it’s going to sweep my magic in and take me away to somewhere that I can’t come back from. It’s not angry with me or the caster, as best I can tell—“ and how magic could be angry, Niles couldn’t answer, but he wasn’t going to stop him— “but this is... it’s excited. Agitated. Someone, somehow, put energy into it as they were pulling. It’s terrifying.”

“Put energy into the dragon vein? Aren’t they giant streams of energy?”

“Yeah. It’s such a strong force, normally you can’t get any in there because it’s pushing against you. But someone forced past it, pushed enough in that there’s someone else’s magic stuck in there, unable to escape. I don’t know whose magic—it’s too deep in there for me to tell, and I’m scared to sense any deeper than what I’m doing now—but... I’ve never seen this before. Ever.”

“And this is where it happened?”

“Oh, no. This is where the dragon vein came close enough to the surface for some of it to escape. All of the magic that was high enough for me to identify would have escaped here, or in a place like this—“

“In a place like this?”

“It won’t be the only one. It’s too far from the site of the light to be the closest spot for escape. There’s more of these. And it’s all drained out, leaving the magic brewing underneath.”

Definitely not good. Niles was starting to understand why Leo was looking more pale, the longer he looked at it. “So how do we get...in? Around? Over?”

At this, Leo sighed. “We don’t. The best we could do it walk alongside it, and hope that we somehow spot Odin from afar. Beyond that, I can’t cross it, and you can’t sense what will kill you on the other side. We just have to wait for—“ Leo squinted, staring off into the horizon, between two of the rock shards— “Odin?”

Niles matched Leo’s gaze, and saw what could conceivably be Odin. He could see enough yellow on him to make that guess, anyway. But so much of him was covered in blood—his left arm looked like it had darkened, crusted patches, with a fresh coat of blood all over him, looking to be splattered on him from multiple places. Where he wasn’t covered with blood, his clothes were charred, with Niles not able to tell in some places whether it was his suit or his skin. And he had foliage and branches stuck in his hair, sticking to his arms—but he was walking. Limping, a bit more like, and clutching his left arm still, but conscious. Far better than Niles was expecting.

“Odin!” And, of course, Leo forgot all caution when he saw Odin. But it was worth it, to see Odin look up and wave to them. “Can you get to us?”

“I can—just give me a minute, I’ll get— to you soon.” Odin sounded like he croaked out more of the sentence than speaking it. The only reason they could hear him was because of how eerily quiet everything had become after the explosion, and even then, Niles strained to hear him. And Odin looked to be fatiguing more as he walked.

Leo and he shared many looks of concern as Odin hobbled over to them. As concerned as Niles was for him, he knew that he would only make things worse by trying to go get him, tripping over a thousand different magical traps that he couldn’t sense. And yet Odin somehow was lucky enough to dodge them all—truly lucky, not skill, considering he was walking (and then climbing) in the straightest line he could manage. (Which was not all that straight, but also not nearly coordinated enough for Niles to believe it was a purposeful set of dodges.)

But then Odin came down the other side of the jagged edge, in a half-fall, half-roll, and Niles and Leo could finally get to him. Leo helped stabilize Odin as Niles picked him up to carry him, and then they started walking out of the mess that was left in the forest, Odin breathing deeply across Niles’s back.

Leo handed Odin a Concoction, but Odin hesitated in opening it. “...if I open this myself, I think I’ll pass out.” Leo popped it open, holding it for Odin while he drank. Niles felt the difference in the way Odin was distributed on his back and in his breathing, although Odin still seemed exhausted in a way that the Concoction didn’t touch.

Niles could tell that Leo wanted to ask the question that was on both of their minds, but was hesitating for some reason. So it was up to him to ask, and hope that Odin actually responded, as opposed to making up some stuff. (Or, more likely in his current state, just ignoring the question all together.) “So, Odin, what happened?”

Odin kept breathing slowly and deeply, to where Niles had thought he went to sleep, when finally he began to speak. “...I ran into the Hoshidans. They were going to capture me. I—“ he laughed, and vaguely flopped his right hand in what would have been some sort of dramatic gesture normally, “obviously, didn’t let them. Don’t think I managed to kill any of them, which was a bit surprising considering the size of the explosion, but I think they all dipped into the wave as I pulled.”

“...so, you opened the dragon vein?”

“Wasn’t too bad opening it, but closing it was hard. Not sure I did it right.”

Leo looked absolutely shocked at this information. Considering that Odin looked like he could have been some off-shoot of the royal line, it was almost a confirmation that they were (somehow) related. But why would someone of the royal line re-enter as a retainer? Did Odin somehow have a claim to the throne greater than Leo’s? Odin didn’t even seem like the kind of man to be a prince, never mind making an active claim. But Leo was looking like he was doubting everything he knew about Odin, and Odin would never be this open again, so he had to push.

“So you’re in the royal line, then.” Even though the glare Leo gave him at the question would have cowed a weaker man, he had to settle this now, even though they both dreaded the answer that was sure to come out of Odin’s mouth.

“Yes...or not anymore? Not Nohr’s. Home. Well, guess it’s not home anymore.”

That was not even remotely the answer he or Leo thought they were going to get, but any further questioning was stopped by the way that Odin passed out on his back. It seemed surprising, shocking, but at the same time... Niles wasn’t as surprised as he should have been. But he couldn’t think of why. Something that he and Leo both had more than enough time to think about on the long trek home.

**Author's Note:**

> Over a year later, and I finally finish the sequel! Thank you for reading and for the encouragement as well—wouldn’t have finished without y’all. But the world needed more Odin, and more Niles and Leo as well! More writing is in the works now that I have time and energy to write again, so hopefully there will be more in this series sooner than 2021!


End file.
